Share your voice CNET’s Queenie Wong contributed to this report. Internet Tech Industry 0 Post a comment Tags Put the old page design back, twitter. This is a cluttered mess without rhyme nor reason. Everything’s small and crowded. What were you thinking? #twitterupdate— Cobalt (@chrissutor2) April 23, 2019 Twitter has a new look. Steven Musil/CNET If your Twitter feed looks a bit different, there’s a good reason.The microblogging service rolled out a redesigned desktop layout on Tuesday that features a simpler, airier look. The redesign, which Twitter announced in January, was previously available to a limited number of users through an opt-in program.The design revamp doesn’t appear to be the same for everyone though. One layout features two columns rather than three, with a larger timeline on the left and the trending topics and who to follow features moved from the left to the right column. Still others are getting a layout with a third, static column that holds the usual tools such as notifications and messages.Enlarge ImageNew look with the (optional?) third column on left. Steven Musil/CNET A Twitter representative said the company is still testing new designs for the website.”We’re testing a few things so people may see different versions,” a Twitter spokeswoman said. “We wanted to test out in the open to get feedback and see what people think.”The new appearance also corrals other customizable features, some that had been made available piecemeal, including the option to change the size of your text, switch to dark mode (with a black background instead of white) and the option to choose the latest tweets first.The changes come as Twitter continues to try to come up with new features to boost user engagement. On Tuesday, Twitter said its monthly active users increased to 330 million in the first quarter from 321 million users in the fourth quarter.Even though Twitter warned months ago that changes were afoot, some users seemed confused by the changes Tuesday.A D. Giggs wondered if Twitter had rolled out a redesign… …while a user named Cobalt begged Twitter to switch it back to the previous layout. “This is a cluttered mess without rhyme nor reason. Everything’s small and crowded,” Cobalt tweeted. “What were you thinking?” Did Twitter just roll out a new design in the last 5 mins? What the….?— D Giggs (@PuddinCusp) April 23, 2019 Twitterread more

Gurdwara Sacha Sauda near Lahore, Pakistan.FacebookIndia has raised its concerns with Pakistan over harassment of two of its diplomats by intelligence personnel last month and asked it to conduct an inquiry and prevent recurrence of such incidents, sources said in New Delhi on Saturday.It also conveyed its concerns regarding the security of the Indian High Commission in Islamabad.Sources said that the concerns about the security of the mission were conveyed to Islamabad in a demarche on April 25.India also sent a note verbale last month protesting about the harassment of two of its diplomats and their being locked up in a room for over 20 minutes at Gurdwara Sacha Sauda Gurdwara near Lahore on April 17.The two Indian diplomats, who were at the gurdwara to facilitate Indian pilgrims, were also threatened and asked never come to the area again.They were locked up in a room by about 15 Pakistani intelligence personnel, their bags were searched and they were questioned.India had earlier this year also raised concern over harassment of its diplomats with Pakistan.read more

Imran Khan met Donald Trump in WashingtonReutersThe US Department of Defence has approved military sales worth $125 million to Pakistan to support its purchase of F-16 fighter jets on Friday. The decision was made a day after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan met US President Donald Trump.”The State Department has made a determination approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to Pakistan for Technical Security Team (TST) in continued support of the F-16 program for an estimated cost of USD 125 million,” the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a statement.While the bilateral talks in Washington on Monday was declared ‘successful’ by both the countries, the defence deal is the first time the US has offered support after security aid to Pakistan was suspended by Trump in 2018.The statement released by the Pentagon said that Pakistan requested a continuation of technical support services from the US government and other technical and logistical support services from contractors to oversee operations. It also mentioned the services were required by Pakistan to conduct its Peace Drive advanced F-16 programme.The statement also said Pakistan had requested a continuation of technical support services — US government and contractor technical and logistics support services — and other related elements of logistics support to assist in the oversight of operations in support of the Pakistan Peace Drive advanced F-16 programme.Around 60 contractor representatives from Booz Allen Hamilton Engineering Services LLC will be sent to Pakistan for assisting and overseeing purposes.The General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, a multi-role fighter aircraft, concerns India as it is often used against its neighbour, with the most recent usage against India in the aftermath of the Balakot airstrikes.Noting the state of elevated tensions between India and Pakistan, the Defence Department said: “The proposed sale of this support will not alter the basic military balance in the region.”Protection of US technology as part of American foreign policy and national security “through the continued presence of US personnel that provide 24/7 end-use monitoring,” was also included.A recent report released by the Indian Defence Ministry has said that Pakistan is expanding its nuclear and missile assets even as the country suffers from a severe economic crisis.Intelligence officials from both the US and India have accused Pakistan army of using terror outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Islamic State to launch attacks on Indian and US assets in Afghanistan.read more

Thousands turned out for Rep. Elijah Cummings’ 17th Annual Job Fair that hosted more than 40 employers and employment resource providers, offering more than 1,000 jobs.The April 14 event at the Fifth Regiment Armory also offered a variety of workshops throughout the day, with topics that included steps to federal employment, searching for jobs using digital media, and employment opportunities available with Horseshoe Casino Baltimore.The event also featured one-stop mobile career centers provided by the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, on-site professionals to help attendees with developing resumes, and digital stations for online job search assistance.read more

Activision Blizzard tapped David Messinger, a former 15-plus-year veteran of CAA, as its first corporate-wide chief marketing officer.Messinger, based in Santa Monica, reports to Coddy Johnson, Activision Blizzard’s president and COO. It’s the first time the video-game company has appointed a CMO who will oversee the global marketing operations across all of Activision Blizzard brands.Messinger’s “tenure in global entertainment and his expertise in strategic, award-winning marketing campaigns will help our communities to grow and further inspire our players to connect, compete and play,” Johnson said in a statement.In a separate management change, on Aug. 14, Brian Stolz shifted from serving as chief people officer (head of human resources) of Activision Blizzard to serving as a special adviser to CEO Bobby Kotick. Claudine Naughton, formerly AIG’s chief human resources officer, has joined the company as chief people officer. Popular on Variety Blizzard Co-Founder Frank Pearce Exits After 28 Years Before joining Activision Blizzard, Messinger was briefly CEO of Verum Ventus, a strategic consulting company for C-level execs, which he joined in October 2018. Prior to that, he spent more than 15 years at CAA, most recently as the co-head of marketing for the sports and entertainment agency. Earlier in his career, Messinger led consumer marketing for Ticketmaster and held various roles at the Walt Disney Co. and marketing agency Leo Burnett Worldwide. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a certificate in film and video from Duke University.Messinger commented, “I have a profound admiration for Activision Blizzard’s track record of developing enduring entertainment franchises. I’m thrilled to be joining the company and look forward to collaborating with the many talented teams across the organization as we continue to connect these iconic entertainment properties to the many communities of engaged fans around the world.”Activision Blizzard’s titles include Activision’s “Call of Duty” and “Spyro”; Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft,” “Overwatch,” “Hearthstone,” “Diablo,” “StarCraft,” and “Heroes of the Storm”; and King’s “Candy Crush.”For the quarter ended June 30, Activision Blizzard reported $1.40 billion in revenue, down 15% from $1.64 billion during the same quarter a year ago. The company had 327 million monthly active users across all titles in Q2 — down 7% from 352 million in the year-earlier period. The company attributed much of the user decline to its split with “Destiny” developer Bungie, which was announced earlier this year. Related Activision Blizzard Q2 Beats Outlook, But Not Last Year’s Second Quarter ×Actors Reveal Their Favorite Disney PrincessesSeveral actors, like Daisy Ridley, Awkwafina, Jeff Goldblum and Gina Rodriguez, reveal their favorite Disney princesses. Rapunzel, Mulan, Ariel,Tiana, Sleeping Beauty and Jasmine all got some love from the Disney stars.More VideosVolume 0%Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcutsKeyboard Shortcutsplay/pauseincrease volumedecrease volumeseek forwardsseek backwardstoggle captionstoggle fullscreenmute/unmuteseek to %SPACE↑↓→←cfm0-9Next UpJennifer Lopez Shares How She Became a Mogul04:350.5x1x1.25×1.5x2xLive00:0002:1502:15read more

Asking young girls to “do science” leads them to show greater persistence in science activities than does asking them to “be scientists,” researchers at New York University and Princeton University find. The study results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Rhodes and her coauthors, who include Princeton’s Sarah-Jane Leslie, note that the messaging children often receive through television shows centers on identity rather than action when it comes to science. Additional coauthors on the work include Kathryn Yee, a researcher in NYU’s Department of Psychology at the time of the study, and Katya Saunders, a postdoctoral researcher in NYU’s Department of Psychology. “Describing science as actions, by saying ‘let’s do science,’ leads to more science engagement than does describing science in terms of identities, by asking them to ‘be scientists,’” explains Marjorie Rhodes, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the study. These findings suggest that efforts encouraging girls to enter science—a field in which they are underrepresented—might benefit from focusing on describing the activity of doing science rather than on encouraging children to adopt scientist identities, at least in early childhood. “The roots of gender disparities in science achievement take hold in early childhood,” Rhodes observes. “This research identifies an element of children’s environments that could be targeted to reduce early gender differences in science behavior among young children.” This research was supported, in part, by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (R01HD087672). Notably, girls who were initially asked to “do science” showed more persistence on the subsequent science game than did girls who had been asked to “be scientists.” “These effects particularly hold for children who are the target of stereotypes suggesting that they might not be the kind of person who succeeds in science—in this case, girls,” she adds. Children were then asked to complete a new science game designed to illustrate the scientific method. Persistence was measured by how long they continued to play this game. By contrast, the effects of language for boys were more variable. For instance, one of their studies found that boys younger than 5 years old showed greater persistence when language was action-oriented while those older than 5 revealed higher levels of persistence when language was identity-oriented. In the newly published Psychological Science work, the researchers conducted four studies with children aged 4 to 9 years old. Here, the children received an introduction to science that described science as an identity (“Let’s be scientists! Scientists explore the world and discover new things!”) or as action (“Let’s do science! Doing science means exploring the world and discovering new things!”). Overall, these findings suggest that identity-focused language can undermine persistence in some children as they acquire new skills, particularly when cultural stereotypes lead children to question if they hold the relevant identity. All data, materials, and analytic code are publicly available via the Open Science Framework. This article has received the badges for Open Data and Open Materials.read more

Cloud computing has risen massively in terms of popularity in recent times. This is due to the way it reduces on-premise infrastructure cost and improves efficiency. Primarily, the cloud model has been divided into three major service categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) We will discuss each of these instances in the following sections: The article is an excerpt taken from the book ‘Cloud Analytics with Google Cloud Platform‘, written by Sanket Thodge. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Infrastructure as a Service often provides the infrastructure such as servers, virtual machines, networks, operating system, storage, and much more on a pay-as-you-use basis. IaaS providers offer VM from small to extra-large machines. The IaaS gives you complete freedom while choosing the instance type as per your requirements: Common cloud vendors providing the IaaS services are: Google Cloud Platform Amazon Web Services IBM HP Public Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) The PaaS model is similar to IaaS, but it also provides the additional tools such as database management system, business intelligence services, and so on. The following figure illustrates the architecture of the PaaS model: Cloud platforms providing PaaS services are as follows: Windows Azure Google App Engine Cloud Foundry Amazon Web Services Software as a Service (SaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) makes the users connect to the products through the internet (or sometimes also help them build in-house as a private cloud solution) on a subscription basis model. Below image shows the basic architecture of SaaS model. Some cloud vendors providing SaaS are: Google Application Salesforce Zoho Microsoft Office 365 Differences between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS The major differences between these models can be summarized to a table as follows: Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Software as a service is a model in which a third-party provider hosts multiple applications and lets customers use them over the internet. SaaS is a very useful pay-as-you-use model. Examples: Salesforce, NetSuite This is a model in which a third-party provider application development platform and services built on its own infrastructure. Again these tools are made available to customers over the internet. Examples: Google App Engine, AWS Lambda In IaaS, a third-party application provides servers, storage, compute resources, and so on. And then makes it available for customers for their utilization. Customers can use IaaS to build their own PaaS and SaaS service for their customers. Examples: Google Cloud Compute, Amazon S3 How PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS are separated at a service level In this section, we are going to learn about how we can separate IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS at the service level: As the previous diagram suggests, we have the first column as OPS, which stands for operations. That means the bare minimum requirement for any typical server. When we are going with a server to buy, we should consider the preceding features before buying. It includes Application, Data, Runtime, Framework, Operating System, Server, Disk, and Network Stack. When we move to the cloud and decide to go with IaaS—in this case, we are not bothered about the server, disk, and network stack. Thus, the headache of handling hardware part is no more with us. That’s why it is called Infrastructure as a Service. Now if we think of PaaS, we should not be worried about runtime, framework, and operating system along with the components in IaaS. Things that we need to focus on are only application and data. And the last deployment model is SaaS—Software as a Service. In this model, we are not concerned about literally anything. The only thing that we need to work on is the code and just a look at the bill. It’s that simple! If you found the above excerpt useful, make sure to check out the book ‘Cloud Analytics with Google Cloud Platform‘ for more of such interesting insights into Google Cloud Platform. Read more Top 5 cloud security threats to look out for in 2018 Is cloud mining profitable? Why AWS is the prefered cloud platform for developers working with big data?read more

Thursday, September 21, 2017 Travelweek Group << Previous PostNext Post >> This is Europe’s least visited country but also one of its most beautiful NEW YORK — Anyone who’s ever been to Europe during the peak summer months is familiar with long lineups and huge crowds. But there’s still one country that’s refreshingly still void of tourists and yet boasts spectacular medieval fortresses, gorgeous mountain views and delectable food: San Marino.According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, this micro-state located in north-central Italy welcomed the fewest amount of tourists in 2016, with just 60,000. But this doesn’t mean the country isn’t worth visiting – on the contrary, with so few tourists and so many beautiful attractions, now is the best time to visit.Guaita, the First Tower of San MarinoCentral square of San MarinoKnown for its cliff-top castles, San Marino is the world’s fifth smallest independent country, measuring just 61 square kilometres. Within its borders, it’s home to such jaw-dropping sights as Guaita, an iconic 11th-century fortress perched atop Monte Titano (San Marino’s highest peak), De La Fratta, a historic tower featuring a small weapons museum, Palazzo Pubblico, where the changing of the guard takes place every day, and the imposing Basilica di San Marino, built in the early 19th century and home to the relics of St. Marinus.More news: Apply now for AQSC’s agent cruise ratesThere are also several noteworthy museums for history buffs, like the Wax Museum, which contains 100 wax figures of historical character, and the Museum of Curiosities, where visitors can marvel over such oddities as 60-centimetre clogs and the world’s longest fingernails.So if your clients are looking to travel off the beaten path in Europe, be sure to tell them about San Marino. But tell them to go quickly, because chances are this ‘hidden’ gem won’t stay hidden for long. Tags: Italy Share Posted byread more